A divide is opening up between flash boosters like EMC and SanDisk and flash realist Gartner. The former see flash drive and fast hard disk drive equality by the end of 2010 but Gartner doesn't see it happening until 2015 or later.

EMC see head honcho Joe Tucci told a JP Morgan Technology Conference that flash and fast HDD prices would converge around 2010. But Gartner analyst John Monroe, sees a huge divide between flash SSD and HDD prices then.

Monroe's figures, revealed by Pillar Data CEO Mike Workman,show that in the fourth quarter of 2009 a desktop 500GB hard drive, meaning SATA and thus cheaper than Fibre Channel, will probably cost less than $40 compared to the more than $70 needed for just 32GB of packaged PC-grade NAND flash. The cost-per-GB comparison is even more telling, with an 8 cents/GB figure for the hard drive and $2.19 for flash, 27 times more expensive.

EMC is seeing flash SSD:HDD price equality whereas Gartner is forecasting a dramatic pricing imbalance. For EMC to be right Gartner's forecast has to be out wildly wrong.

What is EMC seeing that Gartner is not, and where is EMC getting its numbers from?